Welcome to Now See This, THR chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg’s weekly viewer guide newsletter dedicated to cutting through the daunting clutter of the broadcast, cable and streaming TV landscape! Comments and suggestions welcome at daniel.fienberg@thr.com.

As good as Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden is on many levels, granddaughter Zoe Kazan’s seven-part Netflix adaptation is a far better attempt to grapple with the sprawl and complexity of John Steinbeck’s classic novel. Florence Pugh is tremendous as the calculating Cathy Ames, reveling in the role’s nuanced darkness, while Hoon Lee, playing a character cut entirely from the earlier film, gives a performance that will be revelatory to anybody who hasn’t seen a Jonathan Tropper series (Banshee, Warrior, Your Friends & Neighbors). Kazan and co-showrunner Jeb Stuart have restored some of the book’s Biblical depths, though even this version had to trim a number of heartbreaking subplots. I’m not sure if, 70 years from now, anything in this East of Eden will be as memorable as James Dean’s work in the original, but it’s an earnest and admirable approach to the highly admired property.

Imagine, if you will, my horror at Freeform/Disney providing critics with 21 episodes of the YA supernatural drama Coven Academy. That’s a lot of episodes. Imagine, then, my pleasure at seeing that the episodes of Coven Academy ranged in running time between 11 and 22 minutes. Why, that’s practically a Quibi! So I watched all 21. While the young-skewing series — canoodling teen witches and warlocks clash with vampires while attempting to avoid an apocalypse — is too conventional to rise above its demographic limitations, the looseness and briskness of its format was thoroughly admirable. It's all twists, cliffhangers and taboo romance with no time for pesky characterization or logic, delivered by a cast of blandly pretty young people and some millennial pandering with Tiffani Thiessen and Devon Sawa in key authority figure rules. Sure, Coven Academy makes the superficially similar CW offerings The Originals and Legacies look like edgy TV for grownups, but it’s also better, coven-wise, than the new season of American Horror Story.

With the MLB playoffs starting their second round this weekend, a good way to start a fight between baseball purists and the analytically inclined is to bring up WAR. A sabermetric measurement that combines advanced offensive and defensive statistics through a mathematical formulation understood only by a cabal of albino clairvoyants living in Bill James’ basement, WAR is a handy comparative gizmo when correctly applied. When misapplied, it’s mostly a good tool if you want to be a real tool online and ask how anybody could give credence to any statistic that would tell you Buddy Biancalana’s 1985 season, in which he hit .188 with 1 home run and 6 RBIs, was better than Dante Bichette’s 1999 season, in which he hit .298 with 34 home runs and 133 RBIs. You’re comparing apples to manatees, Chad! Anyway, War is also the name of a new HBO legal thriller, which our Angie Han found addictive enough that it briefly made her consider getting a divorce, just to enjoy the courtroom wrangling. She has reconsidered, but the premiere of War — which I didn’t find nearly so addictive despite my love of anything that lets me spend TV time in London — is now on HBO Max. Instead of sampling War, which aspires to be Industry for divorce attorneys but mostly manages to be shiny and smug, I should have watched Starz’s Tip Toe, which earned a rave from Angie.

The 39th installment of CBS’ The Amazing Race kicked off this week with a pair of episodes featuring gorgeously lensed tasks in Vancouver and Madrid, an entirely Big Brother-free cast and one major new twist I’m still scratching my head over. If you’re a producer, you’ve put a lot of effort into conceiving challenges that steer the results of each episode, so why would you undermine their relevance by giving each team a challenge-skipping Express Pass at the start of the season? The ubiquitous advantages completely determined the result of the first leg and dominated the strategy (but not the results as much) of the second, to the degree that it no longer felt all that much like The Amazing Race. Ultimately, I feel the same way about Express Passes in The Amazing Race as Immunity Idols on Survivor: One or two and it tweaks the action in entertaining ways; any more than that and it becomes the focus of the action. Annoyance aside, I loved the silliness of the challenge that required players to wear giant bear paws to catch giant salmon while jumping from a stadium catwalk — just like real bears do — and it’s an amusingly diverse cast, even if I don’t have an instant favorite. Oh, and the right person won on Big Brother and the person who got sent home on Survivor did a very foolish thing. All three shows are streaming on Paramount+.

Mike Flanagan’s new series adaptation of Carrie premieres next week on Amazon, though you can read my review now. In the interim, however, there’s plenty of time to make your way through the other versions of Stephen King’s most adapted property. Obviously, the Brian De Palma 1976 adaptation, featuring the great Sissy Spacek, remains the definitive take on the story of teenage telekinesis and questionable maternal discipline. It’s a classic, and it’s streaming on Amazon. None of the other adaptations are classics, but they’re also streaming on Amazon, including The Rage: Carrie 2, with a solid Emily Bergl in in the lead role, and the unnecessary Kimberly Peirce adaptation featuring Chloe Grace Moretz. Actually, the 2002 TV adaptation, with an excellent Angela Bettis as Carrie White, isn’t streaming anywhere, so you might as well head over to The CW app for the prequel, The Carrie Diaries, with AnnaSophia Robb. 

I would be remiss not to mention several notable recent passings. Dennis Haskins, who earned generation-spanning affection as Mr. Belding on Saved by the Bell, was 75. You can catch random Saved by the Bell episodes on Roku Channel. Mark Piznarski actually died in April at 71, but the news was only reported last week. Piznarski was a lucky charm director on The CW/UPN/CW, helming the pilots for Gossip Girl (streaming on HBO Max), Everwood (Amazon) and Veronica Mars (Hulu), as well as episodes of NYPD Blue, My So-Called Life and Friday Night Lights (Amazon/Paramount+).